Hello!I was looking at some flashlights and most of the ones I like have a sideswitch. The problem is that most of the (affordable) flashlights with a side switch have terrible mode spacing or they lack of temperature monitoring.So I was wondering, how difficult is it to swap drivers on a side switch flashlight?Are there any threads or information on the topic that I haven’t found yet?
It depends on the light. Some lights have a simple driver board that you can replace with your chosen driver of the same size (as long as the driver FW is compatible with using an e-switch). In this case it’s simple; just an extra 2 switch wires to solder. On the other hand some lights have oddly shaped driver and switch board combinations meaning you can’t just swap it out with an off-the-shelf driver. In this case you might have to get creative. Search for the terms “driver piggy back” to look at some of these mods.
If you share specific lights you’re interested in people will be able to tell you more.
Are there cases where the switch board is separate from the driver board?All the switches I’ve seen are directly mounted to the driver board,so I kinda got lost what to do in that case.Do you break off the switch board and mount it somehow to the new driver board or I should try and find similar dimensions for the whole assembly with a new driver board plus a mounted switch board?Also,I imagine it gets tougher if there’s a charging port too?
Yes, a few examples of lights with separate switch boards are the emisar lights and the skilhunt H03.
Lights with switch board connected to driver are less commonly modded for the difficulties you have recognized. It depends on the light and available room in there. If there is enough room you can leave the driver board in there as structure but electrically disconnect it. Then have a separate small driver board sort of loose in there that would be the actual driver that you wire up. This is called a piggy back driver. This option is limited though since you would typically only do this with a FET driver that doesn’t produce much heat and so doesn’t need to be connected well to the flashlight body for heatsinking.
People here might have some ideas or experience if you have a specific light in mind.
I didn’t know that about the switch driver inside remaining at it’s place, or about the FET drivers not producing much heat so thank you for the information!
There are a lots flashlights that I like, I usually notice the host (heat capacity,size,bezels etc) first and then the UI,mode spacing etc.Some of them are the manker u12 & u23, some DQG’s,the fireflies e07,the rofis mr30 & mr50, the sunwayman c41,the wuben to46, the astrolux s43 and some more,but the information about those lights are limited, much more so modding information.
I don’t have a problem with tinkering, I quite like it but I don’t know where to start reading…
Even with all the modders here I guess lots of these lights have not really been extensively modded/taken apart.
The manker U21 was a popular light that has had some work done on it, this below for example gives you an idea of what it looks like inside. It possible has similar construction to the other mankers you mentioned. It looks like it has a separate switch board. Check out lexels driver sale threads. There are lots of different sizes of drivers that come with customizable user interfaces.
Some lights are really not mod-friendly, but you can’t know until you’ve taken it apart.